Especially
the reason for the city’s ceasing to exist is a mystery to many scientists and
there are various more or less well-founded explanations. Authors
are very apt to create a bit of an ideal-world-image of a highly developed
society when talking about Cahokia. They like stressing that things were
running perfectly fine in Cahokia and they are reluctant to continue writing
when it comes to the point where they have to explain why Cahokia ceased to
exist.

Fact
is that – after prevailing for more than 500 years, “Cahokia
declined in 1200-1400 A.D. and was utterly abandoned by 1500”. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/march/12/cahokia.htm20.07.2001) Actually, this is a part of the
Cahokian story that provokes the wildest assumptions. Archaeologists
have come up with several theories about the city’s fate and whilst some sites
pretend to know the facts, others content themselves with just listing the
possible explanations.

More or less, I will try to do the same by listing them while
trying at the same time to figure out their weaknesses and strengths. The
following will present some of them – either of them relying more or less on
speculation and archeological funds.

exhaustion of natural resources & climate change

Depletion
of resources probably contributed to the city's decline. This could have been
due to a climate change or the exhaustion by the Cahokians. A large populations like
Cahokia’s requires additional resources. Excessive tree cutting,
for instance for fire and constructions like the stockade, as well as a landscape change due to maize
fields around the city, certainly destroyed wildlife habitat. This went along
with an ever-increasing
demand on natural resource and the fact that people may have
hunted the local game to extinction.

Possibly,
it was this increasing demand for natural resources that led to a climate
change.

“One theory says their increasing reliance on lumber for fuel, houses
and temples [as well as maize agriculture] culture may have caused [the city’s]
collapse. Removing too much timber from the area would have left nothing to
anchor the soil, so that heavy rainfall would have washed it away, wiping out
the crops.” (http://www.allsands.com/History/Places/indiansmoundbui_ib_gn.htm 19.07.2001)

However, life in the valley of one of
the world's mightiest rivers as such might have posed a considerble risk to the
Cahokians. Yearly flooding as well as large scale flooding destroying the
fields, were likely to have happened.

DISEASE

Although most
sites only draw comparisons to one or the other European metropolis, only few
see the cause for Cahokia’s decline in the fact that it was one of large
metropolitan areas of its time. Lewis Lord even assumes that Cahokia had to “problems
not unlike those that plague modern cities, especially the havoc created by too
much growth” and he continues: “Five or six centuries after its birth,
America's first city, unable to cope with change, was a ghost town” (Lewis Lord
in: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/990816/cahokia.htm19.07.2001). It is suggested that due to its rapid growth and “the heavy reliance on starchy
foods like corn and the high population densities of larger towns may have led
to malnutrition and encouraged the spread of diseases“.(http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/RiverWeb/History/Cahokia/miss/health.html)

Warfare

One common assumption is that warfare
or violence of any kind were the main reasons for Cahokia to cease to exist.
The National Park Service, for instance,
on the one hand thinks that especially the surplusses of every sort, which had
made life for the Cahokians so easy, were reason for greed and - consequently –
fighting for land and property. However, the same article argues that a
shortcut of ressources life supplies of any kind caused by Cahoki’s massive
growth was a reason for Cahokia’s decline.

It seems that – for a city of Cahokia’s
importance - war became a necessary tool for enforcing
political control. However, we do not know, whether they fought on reasons of competing for land, “induced,
perhaps, by their ever-increasing numbers” (http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/feature/riverlif.htm5.9.2001),
or whether “Cahokia,
because of its sheer size and magnitude relative to neighboring Mississippian
groups, might have been perceived as a credible military threat to far off
groups” (Robert J. Jeske in:http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol2/v2_na.htm).

Warfare
is, at least, a
possible explanation for the creation of the
stockade
and archeological finds of the time, showing an increase in martial
symbolism.

There
is biological and archaeological evidence for warfare. In addition to skeletons
bearing evidence of violent death (Milner et al. 1991), some Mississippian
sites are stockaded (Goldstein and Richards 1991), and there are symbolic
representations of pottery and shell engravings, suggesting that a warrior
class or at least some form of warrior veneration existed (Phillips and Brown
1978). (Robert J. Jeske in: http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol2/v2_na.htm)

Some scientists even consider these
signs of violence
visible on some human remains rather as underscoring
this development
rather than a proof for human sacrifice. ( I admit, it constitutes a nicer
explanation than thinking of a people you use as flaghead - because you regard
it as highly civilized - as perfomaning rituals with human sacrifice.)

THE
DECLINE OF POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC POWER

On
various websites we can find the suggestion that the simple reason for Cahokia’s decline
was the breaking apart of its former tight social and topographical network,
which could have been due to a whole range of factors. “Some believe that the
population grew too large and people began to drift away, others believe that
the rulers and priests lost their ability to control the masses.” (http://members.fortunecity.com/allnutt/transamerica/ta2000/megcass/cahokia.html
20.7.2001)

Some
sites such as http://www.interlog.com/~gilgames/cahokia.htm
or http://www.jayepurplewolf.com/PHOENIX/CAHOKIA/cahokia.htmleven go that far to blame the Europeans for the extinction of the
Cahokians, whether through warfare or diseases introduced by them. This seems
odd, since the Cahokians seem to have disappeared about 90 years before the
Europeans arrived on the American continent.But of course it must have been the Europeans who destroyed
America’s one only advanced civilization. There has to be someone to be blamed
for having destroyed this culture. Thankfully, there are some other sites which
refrain from blaming the Europeans for every evil happening to the American
continent.

One
a whole, many of the sites are very eager to draw conclusions on Cahokia’s
fate, just to create a “round” story, however disregarding what scientists
actually assume. We may suggest that
a network of different causes and incidents together somehow caused Cahokia’s
decline.However, since they did not
leave any written records, we may never know the truth.